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Okay, this blog used to be quite active. At the moment it is not.

Last year I noted in September that I’d posted roughly one post every second day on average that year (“I’ve posted 125 posts in 257 days so far this year”, to be specific – here’s a link to the post in question, which however mainly deals with other stuff). Posting frequency has gone down a lot this year, and now I’m finding it difficult to even post once per week. I feel guilty about this, but I also feel silly about feeling guilty about it because I have many much worse and more significant things to feel guilty about (to quote Emil Cioran, “If I were to be totally sincere, I would say that I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living”. My current state of mind is not conducive to blogging).

I recently got the silly idea to leave a link to the blog elsewhere, which has meant that some people have come by and had a look. I’ve noticed that some of them (‘some of you…’) seem to have come by more than once. If you’re one of these people, you should note that the current posting frequency is very much below what has been usual for this blog, which translates into a) there being potentially a lot of stuff in the archives which might be of interest to you, and b) the observation that the current posting frequency is a noisy signal to use for making long-run blog activity-level estimates.

Aside from the book posts, another resource which might help you navigate older posts I’ve written here more efficiently is the category cloud in the sidebar. If you hover over individual categories you can see how many posts I’ve written about each topic, and if you click the category in question you’ll arrive at a page displaying the posts published on that topic – so for example if you click the ‘anthropology’ link to the right, you’ll get to the 53 posts I’ve written on this topic (other examples: medicine: 163 posts, biology: 159, history: 149, psychology: 137, mathematics: 71 – many of the topics featuring in the cloud have an at least to me reasonably high number of posts). As a side-note I should observe that when going through posts from the archives I’m not sure I would recommend reading posts more than a few years old (but this is again still a substantial number of posts, considering the average length of my posts (/time invested/post) and given the historically relatively high posting frequency). If you’re considering going semi-systematically through the archives – and yes, people sometimes do this – I’d strongly recommend you start out by reading posts published this year and then working your way back in time, rather than you starting out ‘at the beginning’ and working your way forward – the latter approach really cannot be recommended, and if you really want to read posts in the order they were written a much better approach than ‘starting at the beginning’ would be to start out at a random point in time nowhere near the beginning and then working your way forward (that ‘random point in time’ should be January 1st, 2013, or something along those lines – not some date in 2008). I should perhaps also caution that a couple of the categories may cause problems in some contexts; for example if you click the ‘lectures’ category, well, that’s a lot of lectures, and if you’re trying to load, say, 50+ hour-long lectures on one blog page in your browser that may cause problems e.g. with the browser becoming unresponsive (in retrospect this was not a good category to include in the categorization scheme, but I didn’t think of that when I started out). The ‘Khan Academy’ category suffers from the same problem; as I have watched and posted lectures on a wide variety of topics I however think this sort of problem is mostly limited to these two categories. I’m perfectly well aware that the categorization scheme could be improved – e.g. there’s both a ‘health’ category and a ‘medicine’ category, and some reasonably well-covered topics with a substantial number of posts do not feature in the cloud (for example there are 30 posts which deal with archaeology on this blog, despite there being no ‘archaeology’ category in the category cloud) – but the system is better than it used to be and I know from experience that when you have a blog with a very substantial number of posts you can spend a lot of time messing around with tweaking and optimizing this sort of thing, and my time is better spent doing other stuff.

I have no idea how the posting frequency will develop in the future, but in terms of the next weeks/months I’m pessimistic, which is part of why I wrote this post.

About me/this blog

This blog is mainly a site where I keep track of and share some of the stuff I read and learn. Only a small subset of the posts on this blog deal with economics – I have diverse interests, and as the category cloud in the sidebar below illustrates this blog contains posts about all kinds of stuff: Mathematics, physics, statistics, geology, geography, health care and medicine, psychology, evolutionary biology, genetics, history, anthropology, archaeology, chess, …

You’re always welcome to ask questions in the comment section. New readers should be aware that the first comment someone leaves on this blog is always withheld automatically to limit spam and needs to be approved by me before it appears on the site; so your first question or comment may not appear immediately.

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Goodreads Quotes

"Happiness and its anticipation are […] proximate mechanisms that lead us to perform and repeat acts that in the environments of history, at least, would have led to greater reproductive success." (Richard D. Alexander)